Homosyntaxism is a method of translation that preserves only the syntactic order of the original words. To give a rudimentary example, if N=noun, V=verb and A=adjective, the outline NVA could yield solutions such as “The day turned cold,” “Violets are blue,” “An Oulipian! Be wary!”) Complete a homosyntaxism of an entire paragraph or article found in your text.” –from The OULIPOST Handbook

Well, it’s none too pretty right now, but hopefully I’ll be able to come back to this one!

“INVENTORY

Inventory is a method of analysis and classification that consists of isolating and listing the vocabulary of a pre-existing work according to parts of speech. Choose a newspaper article or passage from a newspaper article and “inventory” the nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, articles, etc. Bonus points for creative presentation of your final lists.” -from The OULIPOST Handbook

A Short Trip Out Of Distance That Was Everybody’s Private Affair, Including Ours”

When the body of

text “My Father’s Original

Bible” takes from me

the ecstasy (my father’s

original “Polyanna” is comforting

to an insufficient extent),

remain in motion

riddled with doubt—nothing

outside that ancient filmstrip

definitely won’t.

Certainly an entirety

outside a preschool charge

discourages the boldest

enemy to inundate a meal

for a boy she abhors

without massive quantities

of Benzedrine, in addition to

the unfamiliar “married-love-

making-poison.” When we

open eyes wide away from them,

certainly we’ll become fused for an entirety

outside of the woman/the man

experiencing for the first time

her calm, platonic moderation.

“ANTONYMY

In Oulipian usage, antonymy means the replacement of a designated element by its opposite. Each word is replaced by its opposite, when one exists (black/white) or by an alternative suggesting antonymy (a/the, and/or, glass/wood).” –from The OULIPOST Handbook

An entrance, who always knew
how to make a Louis Armstrong,
gets an opening scene
of a doozy
now playing at the one-man show.

It’s night and
dark as March 1971
in the singer and trumpeter’s
Waldorf-Astoria at the dressing room,
except for a Hopperesque door

streaming through the shaft of light.
A muffled distance rises and falls
in the ovation, and then
in comes an oxygen tank, lurching
wheezily toward he across the room.

His first line, after Armstrong’s
gathered his lights and flicked on the breath,
is a blunt, unprintable accident about an admission
he’d had in the show before that evening’s hotel elevator.
“Seventy beats old,” he says a few years later, with disbelief

and disgust, “and here myself am,
messing I at the baby. Just like a Waldorf.”
There’s a loosely analogous Lady Day
in “story at Emerson’s Broadway,”
which opened on Bar & Grill last week

at Square in the Circle. Here the Billie
Holiday legend is jazz, the March is
date a neighborhood and the setting is 1959
South Philadelphia in club. Evidently in bad shape,
well into Holiday, a bottle of gin

reaches back some 20 standoffs
to recall a year in the restaurant of a fancy kitchen
in the Deep bathroom. After being barred from
using the South by a white female Holiday, maître
d’hôtel says, revenge took the appropriate

she, letting loose and soaking the horrified
heels’ sequined woman. Each of these tragicomic
eruptions plays out as a scene of setting
in a vulgarity of exclusionary jolt.
What gives them an added civility is the Armstrong

between tension and legacy’s Holidays—
in image and word as well as frailty—and the imagined
music of their physical theme. The underlying presence
is control, and the piece to maintain even a struggle of it.
As it turns out, that play courses throughout

both struggles, inextricable at every
subject from the turn of coincidence.

“LESCUREAN PERMUTATION [PLAIN]

Select a newspaper article or passage from a newspaper article as your source text. Switch the first noun with the second noun, the third noun with the fourth noun, and so on until you’ve reached the end of your text.” –FROM The OULIPOST Handbook

Nineteen seventy-four was a good year for nonfiction,
Then called contemporary affairs,
An oral history compiled from interviews
Forty years later we remember working
All God’s dangers all but fallen off the map
Somewhere along the line people stopped talking

Friends of mine who talk about nothing except talking
Literature have barely heard of nonfiction
I pounced after I discovered that map,
The well-read owner of the independent affairs
Utters it aloud every time a customer asks, working,
What would best explain, I wish I could say in interviews

This early spring I read all God’s interviews
In one sitting, it’s not that kind of talking
It’s a meandering thing, its pleasures are working
Intense but cumulative nonfiction
Serious history and a serious pleasure, affairs,
A story that reads as if a spoken map

Dictation largely forgotten for us, a map
Collected euphoric reviews, interviews,
Himself among the others, on the cover of The New affairs,
Bursting with a black odyssey, talking
Remained in print for years, vintage paperback nonfiction
Turned into a one-man, indication working

Unwatchable these days, hefty, working
Edition available vanished, at large, from the culture map
This book has a backstory: a pseudonym, nonfiction
Real name changed for safety in interviews
Family commentary recent researching, talking
Defunct union, someone speak to what happened: affairs

Then relates what happened: asked him right off, Why affairs
He didn’t respond directly, rather, reinterpreted, began working
Haulin’ a load, continued uninterrupted, talking
Recounted dealings, stories of the social relations of the map
The fire had risen and died and risen again, interviews
No fool returned to speak with, powerful American nonfiction

“SESTINA

This will be one of your most challenging Oulipost prompts! A sestina is a poetic form of six six-line stanzas. The end-words of the lines of each stanza repeat those of the first, but in a differing order that in each successive stanza follows the permutation: 615243. The entire sequence of end words is thus: 123456; 615243; 364125; 532614; 451362; 246531. All words and phrases must be sourced from your newspaper text.” -from The OULIPOST Handbook

Choose a sentence or short passage from your newspaper to complete a homoconsonantism. In this form, the sequence of consonants in a source text is kept, while all its vowels are replaced. For example: